http://www.countercurrents.org/spence010709.htm
By Emily Spence
01 July, 2009
When threatened, should we conform with lock-step in perverse
obedience to the State's dictates, outlooks and agendas in an
increasingly Orwellian milieu? If not, then we must constantly remind
ourselves and each other of US Supreme Court Justice William O.
Douglas's vision: "Restriction of free thought and free speech is the
most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that
could most easily defeat us."
--
Recently, an American Civil Liberties Union report pointed out,
"Anti-terrorism training materials currently being used by the
Department of Defense (DoD) teach its personnel that free expression
in the form of public protests should be regarded as 'low level
terrorism'." [1]
Despite that DoD officials removed the offensive section from their
educational resources at the urging of ACLU members, the DoD stance
is still troubling since a longstanding practice to designate
peaceful, law abiding activists as dangerous and treasonable still
exists in many government departments and agencies. Indeed the
participants of the first antiwar protest against the Vietnam
incursion, put together in the mid-1960's by peaceable Quakers and
FOR members after having discussed Gandhi's Salt March as a model for
a nonviolent demonstration, faced government operatives filming them
face by face from rooftops as they moved en masse down Broadway to
the UN Plaza. (My mother, a pacifist married to a World War II
Conscientious Objector, and I, a child at the time of the march, both
were in attendance. When the film crew focused on us, she stood tall,
faced the agents with their telephoto lens, glared in disdainful
defiance and, simultaneously, throw the corner of her coat over my
face. Afterwards, she muttered, "How dare they try to intimidate us!")
This sort of happening in mind, the treatment of Nobel Peace Award
winner Aung San Sui Kyi in Myanmar is not necessarily all that
different than the response that she'd receive in the USA and, while
it's commendable that American spokespersons publicly object to her
most recent arrest, they, certainly, might seem to be a bunch of
hypocrites. This is due to the fact that a number of Nobel Peace
Award recipients, such as American Friends Service Committee (AFSC),
have had difficulties of their own on American soil.
For example, "AFSC's work, always open and resolutely nonviolent, has
been under government surveillance for decades. The Service Committee
secured nearly 1,700 pages of files from the FBI under a Freedom of
Information request in 1976. These files show that the FBI kept files
on AFSC that dated back to 1921. Ten other federal agencies kept
files on AFSC, including the CIA, Air Force, Navy, Internal Revenue
Service, Secret Service, and the State Department. The CIA has
intercepted overseas mail and cables in the 1950s, and some AFSC
offices (and even its staff's homes) have been infiltrated and
burglarized in the late 1960s into the 1970s." [2]
In relation, AFSC associate general secretary for justice and human
rights, Joyce Miller, asked, "How can we speak of spreading democracy
in Iraq while dismantling it here at home?" She further remarked,
"Political dissent is fundamental to a free and democratic society.
It should not be equated with crime."
Add to the AFSC problems, those pertaining to Nobel Peace Award
recipient Nelson Mandela, who only a year ago had the designation
"terrorist" removed from his name, under protest by the State
Department, so that he no longer suffered travel restrictions from
the US government. Yet his travel curtailment was not nearly as awful
as was Ramzy Baroud's blockage. He, the editor of Palestine
Chronicle, had his US passport seized by a consular officer at an
overseas American Embassy [3]. Similarly, Senator Edward Kennedy was,
also, flagged by the U.S. no-fly list.
Then again, Ted Kennedy received much less harassment than did Nobel
Peace Award winner Mairead Corrigan Maguire after her flight from
Guatemala had been directed to Ireland through Houston:
"She was probably tired and ready to get back to Belfast, where her
attempts to bring about an end to The Troubles in 1976 made her at 32
the youngest Nobel Peace Prize-winner ever. Since then, she's been
given the Pacem in Terris Award by Pope John Paul II, and the United
Nations selected her (along with the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu,
Jordan's Queen Noor and a dozen or so other fellow Nobel Laureates)
as an honorary board member of the International Coalition for the Decade.
"Unfortunately for Maguire, her flight back home to Northern Ireland
was routed through Houston, where none of that meant diddly. Federal
Customs officials were far less interested in any of that than they
were in a box on the back of the transit form she filled out on her flight.
"'They questioned me about my nonviolent protests in USA against the
Afghanistan invasion and Iraqi war,' Maguire said later in a
statement. 'They insisted I must tick the box in the Immigration form
admitting to criminal activities.'
"Maguire was detained for two hours -- grilled once, fingerprinted,
photographed, and grilled again. She missed her flight home. She was
only released after an organization she helped found -- the Nobel
Women's Initiative -- started kicking up a fuss." [4]
On can add to her troubles countless other ones wherein human rights
and environmental supporters have been repeatedly hassled for no
other reason than that they're holding views that don't jive with
positions at any number of U.S. government institutions. One needn't
return in time to the McCarthy Era to find many individuals who have
been investigated and persecuted for holding vilified opinions. For
example, Stephen Lendman, a peace advocate and writer in his
seventies with a permanent knee injury that delimits travel, has been
repeatedly investigated by the FBI.
At the same time, he is joined by myriad others such as assorted
activists in Maryland whose names were put on federal terrorist lists
by state police who infiltrated their groups. [5] As such, their
perfectly legal activities, freedom of speech and right to unhindered
assembly have been criminalized.
Simultaneously, there's a certain inescapable irony and disingenuous
quality presented by the Western government heads who are harshly
critical of the Iran crackdown on dissenting citizens while they,
themselves, condone similar ironfisted policies in their own lands.
Their two-faced position is barely hidden beneath the surface of
their mock concern for the well-being of Iranian protesters as they
urge their own and allied troops into battle, show little (if any)
sincere remorse over the slaughter of masses of civilians that happen
in the process and make sure that demonstrators at home are
disregarded, denigrated or preemptively rounded up as happened at the
2008 Republican National Convention.
Then again, one might find himself in pretty good company if he were
singled out as unpatriotic and treacherous for holding viewpoints or
undertaking actions that go contrary to the perspectives that a
certain hawkish and totalitarian segment of society holds. All the
same, every method conceivable might be used to hunt down the
offenders and, when taken to the extreme, render their seemingly
provocative positions ineffectual by any means possible, including
imprisonment and murder.
Anyone who doubts this to be the case needs only to remember about
what happened to people like Howard Fast; the slain Freedom Riders
Andy Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner; the thirteen shot
students at Kent State University at which Ohio National Guardsman
fired sixty-seven rounds over a thirteen second period, and scores of
others who have stood against mainstream policies.
Meanwhile, stigmatizing dissidents is a fairly common practice. As
such, "There are 1.1 million people on the [U.S.] Terrorist Watch
List and there is a 35 per cent error rate, minimum, for that list,"
according to ACLU's Michael German. [6] Furthermore, the overzealous
and aggressive surveillance tactics used by the National Security
Agency (NSA) to check the public's e-mails, telephone calls and other
communications are the same ones as were in use during George W.
Bush's administration. Likewise, the amount of spying on personal
exchanges is as high as it ever was.
In relation to recent claims by Justice Department and national
security officials that the overcollection was unintentional, House
representative, Rush Holt, a Democrat from New Jersey and Chairman of
the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, commented "Some
actions are so flagrant that they can't be accidental." Additionally,
the act of tracking e-mailed transmissions and other interactions has
seemed in violation of federal law according to lawyers at the
Justice Department. Regardless, the practice continues.
At the same time, the decision to designate social activists as
troublemakers, while singling them out for intimidation, threats and
investigations, carries serious legal and political implications in
democratic societies.The further measure of subjecting them to the
sorts of difficulties that Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Ramzy Baroud,
AFSC members and innumerable others have endured is clearly based in
xenophobic, paranoid and despotic thinking. It embodies the kind of
authoritarian mentality and oppressive activities that one finds in
the worst types of tyrannical regimes.
As Harry S. Truman suggested, "Once a government is committed to the
principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way
to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures,
until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a
country where everyone lives in fear." Due to this fear, are we,
then, to all conform with lock-step in perverse obedience to the
State's dictates, outlooks and agendas in an increasingly Orwellian
milieu? If not, then we must constantly remind ourselves and each
other of US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas's vision:
"Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of
all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily
defeat us."
--
References
[1] Pentagon Rebrands Protest as "Low-Level Terrorism"
(http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/pentagon-
rebrands-protest-as-low-level-terrorism/).
[2] American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)
(http://www.commondreams.org/news2006/0201-03.htm).
[3] "Punishing activists or pursuing terrorists?" by Maggie Mitchell
Salem in Asia Times Online :: Asian News, Business and Economy.
(http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GL10Aa01.html).
[4] Nobel Prize Winner Gets Hassled At Bush Intercontinental ...
(http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/05/29-8).
[5] Police Spied on Activists In Md. - washingtonpost.com
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2008/07/17/AR2008071701287.html) and Md. Police Put
Activists' Names On Terror Lists - ...
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/
article/2008/10/07/AR2008100703245.html).
[6] One third of FBI Terror Watch List are innocent people
(http://www.russiatoday.ru/Top_News/2009-06-17/
One_third_of_FBI_Terror_Watch_List
_are_innocent_people.html).
--
Emily Spence is an author living in Massachusetts. She has spent many
years involved in human rights, environmental and social services efforts.
.
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